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The executives at Sun Time Novelties Incorporated, like to shoot pole in a back office to let of steam. But lately they’ve had to hang up their cues.
Business is so good their conference room/billiard parlor had to be turned into a temprary warehouse.
“There’s no room in there to play pool,” said Eric Colangelo, who was driving a Pepsicola delivery route a few years ago but today is President of a startup venture, that is beginning to flirt with the big time.
Nobody has had much time to complain about the lack of a lounge at Sun Time, which now employs fifteen people. The company has found a nich with a unusual line of wristwatches that feature college and prosports logos.
A venture, that began four years ago in Colangelo’s loving room, this year is on track to double annual sales to more than $7,000,000.
“It’s happened a lot quicker than we ever thought it would” asserted Colangelo, 35.
Sun Time has sold about halfamillion watches in its foryear history. This year sales ate headed for 300,000. And the company just added a Major League Baseball Incorporated lisence to its product lines, which already include all the NFL teams and 140 colleges.
Colangelo is one of three brothers who runs the company. The others are 33yearold David, vice president of marketing and Glenn, the 32yearold operations man.
The watches, which retail from about $45 to $230, are different.
In addition to team logoes in bold colors, they feature a secondhandusually in the form of a team mascot or symbolthat appears to float around its path. And many of the watches come with recordings ranging from school fight songs to a rendition of “Take me out to the ball game”.
“They’re realy on the ball when it comes to what I call sports fashion,” said Hank Curran, marketing director at The Best of Times, a New York based chain of forty stores that specialize in watches and clocks.
“They’ve sold very will,” said Craig Smith, a buyer at Bradentonbased Champs Sports, a chain of 590 stores. “It’s a unique product priced a little below their competitors. They’ve got a lot of collages the others don’t carry. They’ve even got watches for minor league teams.”
There’s more. Sun Time has done special orders as small as 100 for JCPenney store managers seeking to capitalize on local high school fans’ eagerness to commemerate a state championship.
Limited editions (if a run of 10,000 watches can be called a limited edition) are coming out for memorabalia collectors with sports stars such as Larry Bird.
After a local TV station reported that Sun Time had watches featuring the faces of 17 Nascar drivers, the company was beseiged with hundreds of telephone calls.
“We had to tell them all to go to JCPenney’s,” said David Colnago.
Watches are one of the new ways retailers hope to get even more mileage out of the $9billion licensed sports product market. The Swissmade Swatch Watch turned time pieces into less expensive fashion accessories in the 80’s, and today the average American woman owns seven watches.
As Sun Time gets bigger, however, the competition gets tougher. Such big players as Bulova and Fossil are now outfiting watches with sports logos. And it remains to be seen how much longer the sports fashion trend, which has grown into a manure industry, continues to favor watches.
The Colangelo brothers think the fad has only begun, however.
There taking their first step away from sports with a series of watches that commemorates Native American history. And they’re trying to shorten the threetofourweek lead time on orders phoned to the Hong Kong factory that makes watches to Sun Time’s design specifications.
Licensed sportsproduct makers can make more sales by being the first one to the stores with new merchandise when a team wins a championship.
The brothers gambled that Florida State’s football team would win the national championship by ordering thousands of comemorative watches weeks before the Seminoles played Nebraska last New Year’s day.
The Seminoles won in a close game. Sun Time had “National Champions” watches in the stores a week later that sold like hotcakes.
But Sun Time’s owners, who say the gamble did little to enhance their enjoyment of watching the game, probably won’t take such a chance again.
“If Nebraska won, we where all just going to take a week off,” said Eric Colanglo.